ntimate terms for
forty years. His letters had always been crisp and direct, and
thoroughly familiar and confidential. I do not know just how many
letters I received from him from the Science Community before I noted
the difference, but I have one from the third month of his stay there
(he wrote every two or three weeks), characterized by a verbosity that
sounded strange for him. He seemed to be writing merely to cover the
sheet, trifles such as he had never previously considered worth writing
letters about. Four pages of letter conveyed not a single idea. Yet
Benda was, if anything, a man of ideas.

There followed several months of letters like that: a lot of words,
evasion of coming to the point about anything; just conventional
letters. Benda was the last man to write a conventional letter. Yet, it
was Benda writing them: gruff little expressions of his, clear ways of
looking at even the veriest trifles, little allusion to our common past:
these things could neither have been written by anyone else, nor written
under compulsion from without. Something had changed Benda.

* * * * *

I pondered on it a good deal, and could think of no hypothesis to
account for it. In the meanwhile, New York City lost a third technical
man to the Science Community. Donald Francisco, Commissioner of the
Water Supply, a sanitary engineer of international standing, accepted a
position in the Science Community as Water Director. I did not know
whether to laugh and compare it to the National Baseball League's
trafficking in "big names," or to hunt for some sinister danger sign in
it. But, as a result of my ponderings, I decided to visit Benda at The
Science Community.

I wrote him to that effect, and almost decided to change my mind about
the visit because of the cold evasiveness of the reply I received from
him. My first impulse on reading his indifferent, lackadaisical comment
on my proposed visit was to feel offended, and determine to let him
alone and never see him again. The average man would have done that, but
my long years of training in psychological interpretation told me that a
character and a friendship built during forty years does not change in
six months, and that there must be some other explanation for this. I
wrote him that I was coming. I found that the best way to reach the
Science Community was to take a bus out from Washington. It involved a
drive of about fifty miles northwest, throug